Presentation Title
‘When I Have the Pieces of You, I Will Use Them to Make a New Thing’: R.A. Lafferty’s Grotesque Pulp Evisceration
Abstract
In his early stories “Snuffles” (1960) and “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” (1966), R.A. Lafferty sets characters down in settings recognizable from much early pulp science fiction: unexplored planets, ripe for scientific inquiry and eventual colonial exploitation. The characters, likewise, are exemplars of their type: strapping, manly commanders; grizzled, wise officers; and the occasional token woman character there mostly to be rescued at the end. And, as with many planetary pulp adventures, things don’t go as planned. The results here though are at once grotesque, bloody, hilarious, and distinctly Laffertian, showing an impulse not only to take apart the pulps (held in common with many of his contemporaries in the so-called New Wave), but also to put them back together again in new and startling configurations. By drawing on periodicals scholarship within the field, including particularly Mike Ashley and Lisa Yaszek, as well as extensive archival research, I show how Lafferty’s program of creative dismemberment reveals the usefulness and vitality of pulp plots, characters, and settings in Lafferty’s own era, and well beyond—provided they undergo a little judicious bloodletting first.
‘When I Have the Pieces of You, I Will Use Them to Make a New Thing’: R.A. Lafferty’s Grotesque Pulp Evisceration
In his early stories “Snuffles” (1960) and “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” (1966), R.A. Lafferty sets characters down in settings recognizable from much early pulp science fiction: unexplored planets, ripe for scientific inquiry and eventual colonial exploitation. The characters, likewise, are exemplars of their type: strapping, manly commanders; grizzled, wise officers; and the occasional token woman character there mostly to be rescued at the end. And, as with many planetary pulp adventures, things don’t go as planned. The results here though are at once grotesque, bloody, hilarious, and distinctly Laffertian, showing an impulse not only to take apart the pulps (held in common with many of his contemporaries in the so-called New Wave), but also to put them back together again in new and startling configurations. By drawing on periodicals scholarship within the field, including particularly Mike Ashley and Lisa Yaszek, as well as extensive archival research, I show how Lafferty’s program of creative dismemberment reveals the usefulness and vitality of pulp plots, characters, and settings in Lafferty’s own era, and well beyond—provided they undergo a little judicious bloodletting first.
